10.20.2010

Day 11: Trying out the new lunchroom!

Dev & Lex eating dinner with the Matts--at least a couple of them. (Hey, is that Adam in the background? I didn't even see him this evening!) The school had the new multipurpose room open in the elementary this evening and they were serving the dinner there for the family fun night. The building isn't quite done--the kids said they hadn't had any meals in there yet at school, but it looks pretty nice. Partially it looks so nice because the rest of the facilities all look so awful. Hopefully in the near future they get some funds to so some real renovation--not just the tearing down random walls and spray painting everything on campus (buildings, surrounding grass, windows...) a new shade of puke brown. I hate the lazy, careless approach to maintaining the appearance of the school here. I know there's not a lot of money, but 75% of what bothers me isn't related to how much money they have to work with. Now my kids are even getting old enough to notice how we compare to other places. Israel told me yesterday that his class went in the new part of the building & it was "so nice it was like you weren't even in Mission anymore." And his story was that they were only in the new part of the building because they had to relocate from their current classroom because of an extreme mouse problem. They day before as we were driving beside the school he pointed to a trail of gravel a few feet wide that ran the entire block and explained that they'd had to evacuate earlier that day because of a sewage leak. I don't even know if either of those stories are true, but at this point they are the sorts of things that come to mind when the kids think of the place they go to school. Hopefully these new additions can start to change that.